March 25, 2026

NASA Pushes Space Industry to Use the ISS as a Test Ground for Future Stations (Source: Scientific American)
NASA officials announced that a formal request for information would open on March 25, kicking off a race for private space industry players to weigh in on potential future stations. NASA has long said that it will not build another space station itself. It is instead intent on supporting the construction of commercial outposts that NASA astronauts would be able to visit while the agency focuses its efforts on destinations farther in space. But despite a lot of space start-ups aiming to build orbiting habitats, no commercial space station has materialized, and NASA leadership is losing patience.

The agency is expanding its approach to fostering independent stations by considering proposals to build new orbital outposts directly onto the ISS. Once docked, these fledgling stations could be tested thoroughly before they would detach to fly independently. From there, NASA envisions that it will be just one of many customers that will make use of commercial space stations—and that they will allow the agency to retain access to low-Earth orbit beyond the ISS’s lifetime, which is currently set to end in 2030.

Any awardees under the program would presumably join existing partners that are already working with NASA to develop commercial stations. These include Texas-based Axiom Space, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, space industry powerhouse Northrop Grumman and long-standing ISS partner Nanoracks. (3/24)

Space Force Adds Cyber Units to Guard Rocket Launches (Source: Breaking Defense)
Space Force has established two new cyber squadrons to defend against potential cyberattacks during launches, the service’s Space Systems Command (SSC) announced. SSC Space Launch Delta (SLD) 30 at Vandenberg Space Force Base activated 630 Cyberspace Squadron (CYS) March 10 while SLD 45 at Patrick Space Force Base 645 CYS was reassigned from Delta 6 in September. (3/23)

L3Harris Delivers 100,000 Military GPS Units (Source: UK Defense Journal)
L3Harris Technologies has delivered more than 100,000 next-generation military  GPS receivers to U.S. and allied forces under the Modernized GPS User Equipment (MGUE) Increment 1 program, the company stated. The milestone reflects ongoing efforts to modernize positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) capabilities as military forces face increasing threats from jamming, spoofing and cyber interference. The receivers use Military-Code (M-Code), designed to provide secure and resilient GPS access in contested electromagnetic environments, according to the company. (3/23)

NASA's '1st Nuclear Powered Interplanetary Spacecraft' Will Send Skyfall Helicopters to Mars in 2028 (Source: Space.com)
Skyfall is happening, and it will get to Mars in a totally new way. Last summer, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Virginia company AeroVironment unveiled their Skyfall mission concept, which would send a fleet of tiny helicopters to explore the skies of Mars. NASA announced that it will develop Skyfall for a 2028 launch, and that the mission will journey to the Red Planet on a spacecraft that uses nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) — what NASA is referring to as "the first nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft." (3/24)

A Rare Active Volcano on Mars May Be Causing the Whole Planet To Spin Faster (Source: Live Science)
Scientists know that Mars spins a little faster each year, but the cause has been a mystery. Now, a new study published Feb. 18 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets suggests the reason may lie deep underground, where a huge plume of buoyant rock could be stirring beneath the Red Planet's crust. This strange plume could help to explain not just Mars' quicker rotation but also how the planet holds on to geologic heat far longer than expected — forcing scientists to rethink how small, rocky worlds cool and die. (3/24)

Chandra Resolves Why Black Holes Hit the Brakes on Growth (Source: Phys.org)
Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past.

Ten billion years ago, there was a period that astronomers call "cosmic noon," when the growth of supermassive black holes (those with millions to billions of times the mass of the sun) was at its peak across the entire history of the universe. Between cosmic noon and now, however, astronomers have seen a major slowdown in how rapidly black holes are growing. (3/24)

Former Astronaut Mae Jemison: 'Space Accessibility Has to Be Expanded' (Source: France 24)
In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first woman of colour to go to space. Three decades later, she looks back on what's changed, how space helps advance research and what is still to be done. Her main concern is making space more accessible, but also including the humanities and social sciences in developing space exploration. 'Space accessibility has to be expanded', Jemison tells FRANCE 24, at an age where going to space is often reduced to billionaires. (3/23)

Ramon Space and Ingrasys Expand Partnership to Deliver Scalable Orbital Data Center Infrastructure (Source: Spacewatch Global)
Ramon Space and Ingrasys are expanding their ongoing collaboration to develop data center infrastructure for space by moving space computing from prototype to production-ready infrastructure. The expanded collaboration aims to build and scale data center capabilities in space to support emerging applications.

As data generated in orbit continues to grow, traditional Earth-based infrastructure faces increasing limitations due to latency, bandwidth constraints, power availability, and environmental challenges. Space-based data centers address these limitations by bringing compute, storage, and connectivity into orbit, enabling a new architecture for processing space data in real-time and at scale, as well as supporting new classes of satellite missions. (3/24)

Parabolic Flight Experiments Delve into Planetary Formation (Source: Universe Today)
To see if these instabilities can form in protoplanetary disks (or, if other conditions keep them from forming), Holly Capelo's team built an instrument called TEMPusVoLa in 2020. It contains high-speed cameras to track the behavior of dust particles in an extremely thin gas under vacuum conditions, and the team built it specifically to fly in microgravity parabolic flights. "On Earth, gravity influences the behavior of the dust and gas," said team member Lucio Mayer from the University of Zurich "Only conditions that simulate the absence of gravity allow us to probe an extremely dilute flow regime, similar to the gas and dust disks orbiting around young stars." (3/23)

SpaceX's Orbiting Data Center Satellites are Huge (Source: PC Mag)
Elon Musk offered a first look at his plans for orbiting data centers this weekend, and they will be longer than the ISS. The satellites stand out for their exceptionally large solar arrays. The SpaceX CEO's presentation didn't give an exact length, but each one is significantly longer than the Starship V3 rocket, which stands at 124.4 meters. The satellites also dwarf the length of the ISS, which spans 109 meters and is visible in the night sky. Musk indicated the satellites can capture plenty of solar energy to power the high-density AI processing inside. The rendering shows "the solar panels and radiator to scale,” he said. (3/23)

From Missions to Systems: The Architecture Enabling a Sustained Lunar Economy (Source: Space News)
At Voyager Technologies, habitation systems, life-support architectures, airlock operations, and orbital infrastructure represent decades of operational experience already validated in space. Platforms such as Starlab — the company’s planned commercial space station for research, manufacturing and long-duration habitation — are intended to support government missions, commercial activity and scientific research in orbit.

Succeeding on the moon requires systems built for constant radiation, extreme temperatures, abrasive regolith, intermittent power and autonomous operation. It also means integrating habitation, logistics, power, computing and mobility into a broader, expandable system — a clear departure from convention.

The company delivers scalable life-support systems, durable airlocks designed to handle regolith contamination or radiation-hardened electronics and in-situ computing designed to minimize dependence on traditional Earth-based operations. The reason: future crews will need to operate with local processing capability comparable to their terrestrial counterparts. (3/24)

Moog Taps Redwire to Provide Solar Arrays for Meteor (Source: Redwire)
Jacksonville-based Redwire has been awarded a $12.8 million contract to deliver Extensible Low-Profile Solar Array (ELSA) wings to Moog. The wings will be integrated with Moog’s METEOR satellite bus in support of a LEO mission for an undisclosed national security customer. This marks the first sale of Redwire’s ELSA, a new high-performance, low-mass solar array product. ELSA expands Redwire’s power technology portfolio to support customers with low to medium-power applications across all orbits, including volume production programs with faster delivery timelines. (3/24)